Back to the future with Putin

The first of three reports looking at the changing political map of Russia and how it is using its growing financial muscle both at home and abroad. Today: the president's return to the era of authoritarianism

After four years as a member of St Petersburg's legislative assembly, Sergei Gulyaev is packing up. Boxes, files and a 2007 calendar showing him in a moody leather jacket - all were being carted out of his office. Last month Mr Gulyaev failed to win re-election to the city's assembly. The vote, in 14 regions across Russia, was a rehearsal for December's parliamentary elections - and for next year's all-important presidential poll.

But the end of Mr Gulyaev's political career had little to do with the voters. Last December he and two colleagues voted against a decision by Vladimir Putin to reappoint a staunch loyalist as St Petersburg's governor. Forty-seven other deputies voted in favour.

The Kremlin's revenge was swift. Before the election, the city's electoral commission kicked Mr Gulyaev and his liberal Yabloko party off the ballot paper. Despite all evidence to the contrary, it claimed 34 signatures on an election petition had been forged.

Liberal voters in St Petersburg were left with nobody to vote for. To no one's great surprise, Russia's two pro-Kremlin parties came first and second, leaving the new assembly without dissenting voices. "The decision to stop us standing was revenge for our position," Mr Gulyaev told the Guardian. Peering from his office window on to one of St Petersburg's most beautiful squares, he added: "There is no democracy in Russia. There is de jure democracy. But in reality it doesn't exist."

Seven years after ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin took over as president from an enfeebled Boris Yeltsin, Russia has gone back, critics say, to the classic authoritarian model of the state that flourished under the tsarists and the communists.

Tiny opposition

The accidental anarchy of the Yeltsin era - when TV stations were free to portray the country's leader as an occasional drunk - has disappeared. Instead, Mr Putin has clinically restored the old system of Russian authoritarianism. In this new era, critics of the president mysteriously fail to appear on television; courts eagerly anticipate the Kremlin's wishes; the killers of troublesome journalists are rarely, if ever, caught.

Russia's tiny opposition compares Putin's Russia to Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, another golden economic period characterised by high oil prices and a strongly "personalist" regime. "Of course we can always find some differences with Soviet times, the Brezhnev time, or the tsarist times. But on the whole what has happened in Russia is a classic restoration of authoritarianism," Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of handful of independent MPs left in Russia's duma, or parliament, said.

Speaking in a cafe near the duma's modern offices, he added: "It's a restoration in several aspects. It's a restoration of the traditional Russian model of the state, society and political system, and of rhetoric in Russian-western relations."

Like Sergei Gulyaev, Mr Ryzhkov's political career is almost over. Two weeks ago Russia's supreme court liquidated his Republican party on the grounds that it had too few members. The party had violated electoral law, the commission said.

The ruling follows numerous changes by the Kremlin to Russia's electoral system. Previously, Mr Putin abolished elections for provincial governors - he now appoints them. He also imposed Moscow's control over local budgets. Under the latest rules of the game, political parties must have 50,000 members and be represented in half of Russia's provinces.

Additionally, Russia's old mixed constituency and list system has been replaced by a list-only system, making it impossible for popular independent local candidates to stand again as MPs. The hurdle for parties to win seats in the duma has gone up from 5 to 7% of the overall national vote. With fewer Russians voting, the minimum 25% turnout rule has disappeared. Moreover, the Kremlin has invented a social democrat-style "opposition" party called A Just Russia, which competes for votes against Mr Putin's ruling United Russia party. But like United Russia, A Just Russia patriotically supports the president, while maintaining the illusion of democratic rivalry. It also takes away votes from the communists and nationalists.

Kremlin political theorists describe this form of virtual politics as "managed democracy". Mr Ryzhkov, meanwhile, says he lugged five boxes into court proving his liberal party had 58,000 members. The court ignored this evidence, he says.

The sum effect of these changes will be to kill off Russia's few genuinely independent political actors, critics suggest. Even before anyone has gone to the polls the shape of the next duma is widely known. It will be made up of four parties: United Russia, A Just Russia, the ultra-nationalists and the communists.

"Either you are part of the game, or part of the pseudo-opposition, where you co-operate with the Kremlin guys and never touch Putin. Or you can't participate in politics," Mr Ryzhkov says. His assessment of Putin's Russia is bleak. "Almost all the results of perestroika and democratisation have been killed," he says.

But there are growing signs that the Kremlin's attempts to micro-manage the elections and ensure the smooth transition of power from Mr Putin to an as yet unknown successor picked by the Kremlin are not going quite as well as they might.

The trouble started in St Petersburg, Mr Putin's backyard and where he grew up. Last month Mr Gulyaev led 5,000 demonstrators through Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg's central boulevard. The avenue finishes at the Neva river and the Hermitage museum, the tsar's former palace and the scene of an uprising by another angry group, the Bolsheviks, in 1917.

The protesters included representatives from all Russia's main opposition parties, Yabloka, Garry Kasparov's United Civil Front, the National Bolsheviks, and the Popular Democratic Union. But they also included hundreds of locals, fed up with rising prices, corruption and the lack of real electoral choice. Demonstrators were also unhappy about plans to construct a giant tower for the state-owned energy firm Gazprom in St Petersburg.

It was the largest anti-Putin demonstration ever. The demonstrators blocked traffic for two hours and police arrested 113 people. The size of the demonstration appears to have surprised and rattled the Kremlin. Last month authorities in Nizhny Novgorod crushed a similar demonstration, detaining dozens of activists before they had even had a chance to assemble in the city's Gorky Square.

Next week further anti-Kremlin demonstrations are planned in Moscow and St Petersburg. This month opposition leaders will also meet to agree a unified anti-Kremlin candidate to stand in the presidential election in March 2008.

Russia's state-run television channels have reported none of this. Since 2001, the Kremlin has enjoyed a monopoly on state-run television, the main source of information about society for 85% of Russians. The situation in the print media is mixed. While most publications take a pro-Kremlin line, Russia has four relatively independent newspapers, including Kommersant and the respected business daily Vedomosti. There is also a liberal radio station Echo Moscow. Collectively, however, these reach only a tiny audience.

Threat of extremism

The government, meanwhile, dismisses western accusations that Russia is backsliding on democracy as a "misperception". Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's chief press spokesman told the Guardian: "We are convinced this is wrong. Russia has come a tremendous way in 15 years from a one-party totalitarian regime to a multi-party democracy with free elections, and a free press."

He dismissed the idea that Yabloko's failure to take part in the elections in St Petersburg was due to sinister government forces. "It wasn't a plot by the Kremlin. There are laws in this country. You have to perform certain formalities to participate in elections. They failed to do that."

The authorities had taken a tough line on recent pro-democracy marches because of the "threat of extremism," he added.

Most political observers believe the Kremlin regime is impregnable, especially when world gas and oil prices remain high. They also point out that Mr Putin enjoys broad support. "One fact about the contemporary Russian situation is that the majority or a plurality of the population supports the current president. The majority isn't very much. But 55-57-58% express their trust in Putin personally," says Dr Grigorii Golosov, Russia's leading election expert, and a professor of politics at St Petersburg's European University. "But judging from recent elections only 31% of the population is prepared to vote for United Russia. Plurality support is definitely there."

Nobody really believes that St Petersburg, the scene of uprisings in 1905 and 1917, is on the brink of another one. "We don't want a revolution," Sergei Gulyaev says. "We merely want free political debate in the media and the guarantee of participation in the elections. These are fundamental things."